Why the Military Needs to Rethink Moms and Babies

War is not a family oriented affair. Just as it rips families apart by taking the lives of loved ones, it does the exact same thing by taking away parents for long durations. I have no doubt that when we started allowing women in the military, there were criticisms on whether or not they could still be good mothers given the long periods of absence. Not unlike the issue of women in the house versus women in the workforce. Plenty would argue that we don’t think the same thing about men when they’re preoccupied with what they’ve pledged their sweat and labor to, but it doesn’t make this dilemma any less problematic. Absent dads are the rigor in stories of people who grow up without parental stability, and absent mothers are just as painful.

People will have children so long as they’re having sex, and today’s family structure is nothing like what it’s “supposed to be” in theory. We can’t say that people in the military can’t have sex or reproduce, since we already know the results of the abstinence only program with teens and I doubt this will work with grown adults. The nuclear family, where support can fall on one spouse while the other goes off, is often hard to come by today. We have instances where both spouses belong to the military, or there’s a single parent taking care of the child who needs to be deployed. Alexis Hutchinson, who stirred a frenzy in the media for being arrested after she refused to be deployed because she was unable to find suitable child care for her 10-month old baby, is not the only single parent who has been asked to go to Afghanistan. In fact, in 2009, there were over 30,000 of them. Not all of them with babies of course, but they were single mothers with children back in the U.S. nevertheless.

This is reality.

We have families that consist of single mothers, sometimes women who are the only source of protection and care for children, monetarily speaking and emotionally as well. If an institution fails to recognize that the people they’re sending out are no longer the ones from the 1950s, then they’re ignoring the present day world. The military needs to set limitations on mothers of babies and toddlers, and develop a system to handle situations where a child might not fare as well without the parent

According to a 2009 report done by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to spotlight the problems that military women face, the army gives a new mother four months to stay with her baby after giving birth before deploying. This is despite the fact that the army has the longest tour duty out of the other divisions. The length of time for a mother to be with her child varies among different military divisions. According to the IAVA report, the marines, for instance, allows for up to six months before a new mother is deployed. It’s curious that this allowance for mothers vary according to military division and not even according to the length of their tour duties.

These rules reflect the compromising of women’s needs in the military, and in many cases, not just women’s needs but the needs of children as well.  The military is, at present, deficient when it comes down to dealing with mothers of newborns. War is war, but as a society, how we allow for this to happen speaks volumes about us.